Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Sheena Wagstaff with Reliance Foundation chairperson Nita Ambani

(Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

India’s richest woman with a $20 billion family fortune and a 27-story sky palace in India’s south Mumbai, billed as the world’s most expensive home for its $1 billion estimated cost – Nita Ambani is now eyeing the art world. Her new interest is the conservation of Indian art forms and making them more widely known internationally. Recently her Reliance Foundation sponsored an exhibition of traditional Indian pichwai paintings of Shrinathji, the Ambani family deity, at the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s also the biggest funder of the new Met Breuer’s debut show of modernist drawings by Nasreen Mohamedi, the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work in the U.S. Nasreen’s exhibition ‘Waiting Is a Part of Intense Living’ made its debut at the Reina Sofia Museum in Spain this past September.

During an interview Nita says that she is planning a museum of her own in India with an exhibition space for traveling art shows to be housed in a massive convention centre that she’s building on a 19-acre plot close to her Mumbai school. To be opened in 2018, it will include exhibition areas, a 2,000-seat theatre, retail spaces, offices and residences.

Reliance is India’s largest private company, founded by Mr. Mukesh Ambani’s father Dhirubhai Ambani. Mukesh Ambani recently announced his foray into Reliance Jio with an investment of Rupees 1.5 trillion.

Talking about her interest in the world of art, Nita says, “When I set up the Reliance Foundation in 2010, I was keen that it promotes and nurture India’s ancient heritage in a holistic way. When the people from the Art Institute came to see me, I saw an opportunity to showcase our culture to a global audience.” Madhuvanti Ghose, the Art Institute’s curator of Indian art, says, “The speed at which the Ambanis work; no one else can surpass them. As for Ms. Ambani art is a new door for her, but now that she’s walked through, she sees how desperately we need her.”

Indian collectors have already ascended the upper ranks in the world of art. Hotelier Anupam Poddar and Kiran Nadar, the wife of HCL Technologies’ founder, Shiv Nadar have opened private museums for their contemporary art collections in the greater New Delhi.

Madhuvanti says, “Nita sits at the top of India’s wealthiest families, a tastemaker whose travels and causes are closely followed in Mumbai and elsewhere. Until now, she was best known for promoting health and education initiatives—as well as cheering on her husband’s cricket team and soccer league—but her artistic interests, besides dance, have long been something of a mystery.”

Nita’s love for art and sculptures reflects at her Mumbai mansion. Nita says she has slowly added modern and contemporary artworks, nearly all Indian, from earthy abstracts by M.F. Husain to the gold orb sculpture by Anish Kapoor that hangs in her living room. She recently commissioned Subodh Gupta to create a 9-foot-long installation using metal and brass cooking vessels to create a map of Mumbai.

According to a recent Forbes report Nita has been named the most powerful businesswoman in Asia by Forbes, leading a list of 50 women leaders from the region that includes eight from India.

Source – http://www.blouinartinfo.com/

Nasreen Mohamedi (18 March – 5 June 2016) at The Met Breuer, New York, is by far the most comprehensive exhibition of any Indian artist in the United States. With more than 150 works by Mohamedi on display, the exhibition brings to an international audience more than three
decades of her work, comprising of her few early oil paintings, collages, drawings in ink and graphite, watercolours, and photographs. Mohamedi rarely theorized or spoke about her work but documented her internal dialogue in a form of soliloquy, in tiny personal diaries and notebooks, some of which will be on display in the exhibition. The exhibition explores the conceptual complexity and visual subtlety that made her practice unique in its time.

​In the history of Indian Modernism, Mohamedi remains a distinct figure who broke away from the dominant figurative-narrative mainstream practice and became one of the outstanding artists who pioneered the trajectory of non-representational and non-objective art in India, as well as creating a body of work vital to the evolution of international modernism and abstraction.

In cultivating an interiorised vision, Mohamedi sought to reflect beyond the familiar and the known, arriving at a pristine form of abstraction quite apart from her contemporaries. The grids and geometry she leaned toward in the 1970s were not without precedent though. In the West, closer to her time, were Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Constructivists. Closer to home were the mystical traditions of the East that relied on geometry for a symbolic manifestation of the universe and its creative force. Drawing upon this range of inspirations, Mohamedi evolved her own formal vocabulary with delicate grids using only line, and this aesthetic informed and infused the photographs she took throughout her life.

Mohamedi’s practice has garnered serious attention within India and globally only in the last fifteen years. Though admired in her lifetime, she remained enigmatic and elusive, quite the reflection of her work – a distilled oeuvre that does not lend itself to ordinary comprehension. Through her uncompromising singular pursuit, Mohamedi arrived at a harmonious melding of the rational and the poetic, the philosophical and the mystical.

Kiran Nadar, Chairperson and Founder of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, “This is a momentous occasion for KNMA, having collaborated with two veteran institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States and the Reina Sofia Museum in Spain, in bringing Nasreen Mohamedi’s individualistic/distinctive practice to the western world. The museum’s mandate is also focused on artists whose practice is yet to receive desiring attention and critical acclaim. We believe that their stories be told.”

Credits http://www.yareah.com/2016/02/08/new-york-exhibits-a-retrospective-of-the-indian-modernist-nasreen-mohamedi-opens-at-the-met-breuer/

Kiran Nadar, founder of India’s only private art museum, says that she wants the common man to go to museums regularly

 All the things you think of when you hear the words ‘art’ and ‘museum’ together in the same sentence, are absent when you visit the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. It’s inside a mall, a couple of minutes from one of the busiest shopping-eating-chilling hubs in South Delhi. There’s nothing subtle or boring about it – even before you enter, you’re greeted by a gigantic mushroom cloud of utensils, Subodh Gupta’s Line Of Control, towering 36 feet above you.

 However, museums as Indians know them are usually state-funded and slightly academic – what is, then, a ‘private, philanthropic’ museum, which KNMA is? Founder and chairperson Kiran Nadar explains, “Basically, a museum is a place of learning, intended to expose people to various tracks of cultural activity and art, in various forms. The state has certain responsibilities (to build museums), but in America – let’s take that as an example, since it has the maximum number of private museums – most museums are not state-funded, and are comprised of collections of various people who’ve collected through their life and then donated it to form a private museum, which is how this culture of private museums started. Our thought was that I had a collection, and I felt I should do something meaningful with it, not just put it into storage.”

 “And from that came the idea of setting up a private museum along the lines of what is in abundance in the US, thereby fostering the arts and sharing the collection with people,” says Nadar. “Basically, I also get to see my own collection, which I wouldn’t if it were in storage! I felt that art dissemination and art knowledge translation was what something we could do.” To that aim, it’s also “not for profit,” she says. “The collection has been deemed to the museum, and entry is free. We do school outreach programs, workshops – whatever we can do to foster the arts, we try to do.”

 Nadar has stressed that she’d like to see ‘sustained dialogue’ and ‘visibility for modern and contemporary Indian art’ – but doesn’t Indian art have visibility globally already? Or is it that the Indian is less aware of Indian art than the rest of the world? “It has limited visibility – I wouldn’t say less or more – but Indian modern and contemporary art, compared to, say, Chinese modern and contemporary art, is definitely on the backburner. Chinese collectors are definitely more (in number), and it has a more sophisticated, larger collector base. In India, that base is very small. Because of that base being small, the dialogue with art is also much less. You don’t find a museum being part of people’s activities on a regular basis. If you go to any western city, you find that people visit museums in the normal course of things – if a show opens, the common person, not just the art connoisseur or art-interested – will go and visit. But in India, that hasn’t happened. Even at the NGMA – take a show like Anish Kapoor’s – it got visibility, it got footfalls, but again, I feel they could have been much more. The wider audience did not go in the numbers that they should have,” she says. “There is a gap in the dissemination of knowledge to people, which needs to be bridged so that they decide that a museum is not a stultified, boring, moth-eaten place. It is vibrant, like going to an exciting movie. It has the same kind of stimulating possibilities. Therefore, people have to get interested in doing this, they have to go to a museum once in six weeks, once a month; it has to become a part of their to-do list. India has such a great heritage of art, and it’s a shame that culture is not disseminating further.”

 Art is anything but ‘elitist’, says Nadar, and she’d like people to learn that through the various outreach programs that the museum does. “When we have a school project, we try and tell the kids to bring their parents. Normally, it’s the parents who bring the kids, but the reverse might happen if the kids become interested. The dialogue with the lay person is important. Unless the lay person gets interested, it’ll remain ‘elitist’, and the aim is to keep it for everyone,” she asserts.

 One of the few instances when ‘everyone’ does get to hear of art is when Indian works are snapped up at exorbitant prices in global auctions. Is that one of the reasons people think it’s elitist? “Prices do have a curiosity value. It’s like a 100 crore film, but people are not going to watch it just because it’s a 100 crore blockbuster, they’re going because of the entertainment value of the movie. That is what we want to inculcate. The curiosity of a painting going at a certain price is always going to be there, it always has an ‘awe value’, but if that value can be translated into people saying ok, this artist’s work is showing at the museum, then there should be a natural curiosity of people going to see that work. But when you have a show, you can’t always have trophy works to lure people. The aim is to show work which is part of a theme. Like this show (Is It What You Think?), it has a work on the Babri Masjid, which has a historical perspective. Even though there are no trophy works, there is a Nalini Malani retrospective. The show has a social ambit, social messages that are very strong. We want people to feel motivated to see and relate to these works,” she says.

 Nadar starting collecting art ‘for herself’, but that changed when she set up the museum. “Initially, it was completely subjective to what I felt I should buy, and that stays – if I feel a work is important, I’ll buy it. But today, I look at it in more depth, I look at the collection as a whole, and if I’m collecting Indian art, then I look at gaps in my collection. If someone asks, are you buying this for yourself, I tell them there’s no ‘self’ left at all, unfortunately – it’s all for the museum. I’m still emotional about art, but I don’t buy as impulsively as I did. I study a lot more before I go in and get a work,” she says. She’s also planning a third building for the museum, an iconic structure in Delhi with the ‘destination value’ of the sort that the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, has.

 The museum has three ongoing exhibitions currently – one is Chapter 2 of Nalini Malani’s Retrospective (1964 – 2014) – You Can’t Keep Acid In A Paper Bag. The second is Unfinished Portraits, which features in-depth oeuvres of 16 Indian artists from the KNMA Collection. The exhibition displays a contextual history of Modernism in India, its ideological moorings at Santiniketan with Nandalal Bose, Binode Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij, Krishna Reddy, Somnath Hore and Ganesh Pyne from Kolkata, two artists – FN Souza and MF Husain from the Progressive Artists’ Group (Mumbai), and Jeram Patel, Himmat Shah, Arpita Singh and Bhupen Khakhar from Baroda and Delhi, and also contextual photographs of Madan Mahatta, Richard Bartholomew and Ida Kar. The third is Is It What You Think? – Ruminations On Time, Memory and Site, a group exhibition showcasing the work of 17 artists. The exhibition is intended as a compliment to the three-part retrospective of Malani’s work.

 Nadar says that this momentum started last year with their Nasreen Mohamedi retrospective last year, the largest retrospective of her works in the world, with 138 works. On Is It What You Think?, she says, “This particular show has 17 different artists with their perspectives on war, on various things that have happened socially in the Indian fabric. There’s a perspective this year – society has slightly greater awareness. We’re showing Amar Kanwar’s video installation on rape, but it’s a burning subject, with the Badaun rape, Nirbhaya… Bengal to UP, everywhere it’s a malaise, and it’s incomprehensible how depravity of this kind can exist. And yet these artists have talked about it in an earlier period of their lives. There is a great social fabric to this show and it mirrors society in more ways than you’d expect. Babri Masjid (demolition) on one level happened many years ago, but today again, the issue of a Ram temple might emerge. There are issues to be seen and to be connected with.”

 But the Modern masters remain closest to her heart, because “that collection is completely from the KNMA collection, it’s part of what I have collected. It’s a very intimate show because all the works are small and paper works, and it’s I suppose easier to comprehend for the lay person, because it’s translatable into a figurative rendering. It’s very dear to my heart because all these small works I collected out of complete passion for the art, at the stage when I was buying for myself,” she says, smiling fondly.